I didn't express mine for a long time. Not because I didn't have them — I had them all the time. I just didn't know what they were, and I definitely didn't know what to do with them.
Most men I talk to are in the same spot. It's not that they're cold. It's that somewhere early on, they learned that expressing emotion meant risking something. Maybe love. Maybe respect. Maybe belonging. So they did what made sense: they pushed it down, pushed through, kept moving.
The problem is that emotions don't go away because you stop expressing them. They just go underground. And a man who's lost contact with what he's feeling has also lost contact with what he actually wants, what he actually needs, and what's actually driving him.
I'm not going to tell you that expressing emotion is easy or that you should just start doing it. But I will say this: the men I know who've gotten freer didn't do it by performing emotion for an audience. They did it by getting honest with themselves first — just noticing what was actually there, without demanding that it look a certain way. That's where it starts. Not with a big dramatic moment. With a man sitting alone and admitting what's true.
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